This invention relates generally to interactive media guidance applications, and more particularly, to automatic advertisement generation using an interactive media guidance application.
With the increasing use of interactive program guides and other media guidance applications, advertisements shown within such applications have become an important promotional tool. Advertisements, for example, may promote future media programs, ongoing television series, and pay-per-view programming, in hopes of attracting more viewers to these programs. Advertisements may also promote products and services unrelated to television programs, such as automobiles or food products. In some media guidance applications, multiple advertising display opportunities may be available simultaneously. For example, a number of advertisement display regions located within various display screens of the application may be available for presenting advertisements to a user.
In conventional interactive television application systems, advertisement display regions are filled with advertisements provided by a remote server or other remote advertisement source. These advertisements may be delivered to user equipment and stored for future display. However, suitable stored advertisements are not always available to fill all available advertisement display regions. Typically, these advertisement display regions remain unfilled or are filled with placeholder advertisements.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a systematic approach for filling all available advertising display opportunities within a media guidance application.